Georgia's Joseph Emerson Brown was
a self-made man successful in both business and politics who became
rich, in part, by adroitly using his political power to foster his
extensive business interests. Being on the losing side of The War
Between the States undoubtedly slowed down his acquisition of wealth,
but it did not even temporarily impoverish him. It was what he said, and
what he did; not charisma, that won elections for Joe Brown, as he was
not very likable; neither a good speaker or good looking; and came from
a humble background in a day when most of Georgia's political leaders
came from the elite planter class. The only man to have four times been
elected governor of Georgia, conceivably, if he had not been forced to
resign as a result of the defeat of the Confederacy, he could have been
reelected to a fifth term. He also served the State as a circuit judge,
state senator, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, and U.S.
Senator. (While in his day Georgia's governors were elected by popular
vote, U.S. Senators were elected by the state legislature.)

Georgia Governor
Joseph E. Brown
He was the owner of iron and coal companies in Northwestern Georgia
(mostly Dade County); the president of the firm that after the war
leased the State-owned Western & Atlantic Railroad; and a large investor
in real estate and stocks and bonds.

Georgia's coal and iron deposits
were largely undeveloped until after the Civil War, when Brown began
mining operations. He realized the potential of railroads in general
both in economic development and as a field of investment. Besides that,
railroads fascinated Joe. Mixing business with pleasure, he often spent
days riding up and down the Western & Atlantic's line connecting Atlanta
with Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Because the governor chose to say
little about his investments and placed no value on them in his will, it
is impossible to accurately measure how wealthy he became, but in 1881,
while serving in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported that Brown
was worth one to two million dollars. [July 2, 1881] At his death some
estimated his wealth at up to $12 million.

Brown's contribution to Education

Called "The Ploughboy" before the
war by planter enemies because he came from a non-slave owning family,
he moved to North Georgia after his birth in the Upcountry of South
Carolina in 1821. In this mountainous part of Georgia's Upcountry there
where few educational opportunities; so when he was 19, clad in homespun
clothes, he traveled to South Carolina, where he traded a yoke of oxen
for room and board and arranged to attend the Calhoun Academy on credit.

Upon his return from that school,
Brown taught school in Canton, Georgia and studied law in his spare
time. Without ever having read a day in a lawyer's office, he was
admitted to the bar in Canton [Cherokee County]. He also worked as a
tutor. Throughout his life he sought to prevent others from having to
struggle as he had in order to get an education. As Georgia's governor
in 1858, he advocated that schools be established so that every "free
white child" would have the right to attend. "Let," he said, "the
children of the richest and the poorest parents in the state meet in the
school room on terms of perfect equality of right..." This was needed,
he believed, because the State's lack of development was for want of
education. While he did not get all he asked the legislature for, it did
set aside money from earnings of the Western & Atlantic (W&A) to educate
white children.

Brown served on the University of
Georgia's board of trustees from 1857 to 1889. He served, too, as
president of the Atlanta Board of Education from 1869 until 1888. His
contribution to education in Atlanta was recognized after his death by
the naming of a now closed high school (originally a junior high school)
in his honor. When he was in the U.S. Senate, Brown said that the
federal government should finance the education of children of all
classes and both races. He did not agree with those who said the
education of the people was not a federal responsibility because "we do
not live under the Constitution that we lived under" prior to the War
Between the States. This was due to the fact that its powers had been
greatly expanded since then.

In 1845, after passing the bar,
Brown enrolled at Yale's Law School, financing this with money borrowed
from a Canton physician who he would later, as governor, appoint to head
the State-owned railroad, the Western & Atlantic. After receiving a
Bachelor of Law degree in 1846, he returned to Cherokee County, where he
practiced law and married the daughter of a local Baptist preacher.

His belief system

Before 1865, Brown was a
Jacksonian Democrat who shared Jackson's belief in the spoils system;
his anti-bank philosophy; and his appeal to the common man. An adroit
opportunist, he was so devoted to states' rights that many historians
believe that as Georgia's governor he hindered the Confederacy's war
effort.

As governor, he replaced both the
top management of the W&A and many minor officials with supporters. He
instructed the Road's superintendent "to cut all unnecessary expenses,
but keep the railroad in good repair; dismiss all employees who were
supernumeraries or not absolutely necessary to the operation of the
road. Where salaries were found to be higher than those paid for similar
service on other railroads they were to be reduced. He was to require
'absolute subordination, and prompt obedience to orders.' All employees,
regardless of position, who were known to use 'intoxicating liquors of
any kind' as beverage or were engaged in 'gaming' or 'any other
dissipation of immorality' were to be dismissed. Strict economy was to
be required in even small transactions....'Prompt obedience to these
orders will be required. That they may not be misunderstood by any, you
will have them printed and a copy delivered to each officer and employee
on the road.'"

After the War, he became a
Republican and moved to Atlanta, which the Republicans who then
controlled the state government had made the State's new capital.
Despite having allied himself in both politics and business with
carpetbaggers and scalawags, after the State was "redeemed," he returned
to the Democratic Party. He then became a member of a group of Atlanta
politicians and their handlers called by various people at various times
the Atlanta Ring or the Kirkwood Ring. (The chief handler was Henry
Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution.) For many years, Brown and
two other members of this group, called the Bourbon Triumvirate,
dominated the State politically. As a Democrat, Brown was appointed to
and subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate.

Slavery

In a December 7, 1860 public
letter, Brown explained why people like those from whom he sprang would
suffer if the slaves were freed, something he believed the capture of
the White House by a Republican and the resulting Republican-appointed
federal judiciary would bring about within a quarter of a century. If,
he wrote, as had been true in Great Britain when its slaves were freed,
slave owners were compensated for the loss of their slaves as he, who by
then owned a few slaves, believed was fair, non-slave owners would have
to pay high taxes to raise the necessary funds. This would be true even
if, as was unlikely, Northerners agreed to bear part of the cost. Like
many Southerners, he did not think whites and blacks could peacefully
co-exist in the absence of slavery; so he thought sending them to Africa
was a good idea. However, the cost of financing their transportation;
the acquisition of land for them there; and supporting them until they
could get established would significantly further increase the tax
burden on non-slave owners.

If they were not sent to Africa,
they would remain in the South because some of the Northern States had
already passed laws prohibiting free blacks from settling in them. Even
if slave owners were not compensated for the loss of their slaves, and
the slaves were not returned to Africa, non-slave owners would suffer
economic harm. This was because money that still relatively wealthy
Southerners would previously have invested in slaves would, instead, be
used to buy land. They would soon buy all the lands in the South worth
cultivating. Then poor whites would all become tenants like they were in
England, the New England States, and in the other old countries where
slavery did not exist. The freed slaves, too, would become tenants, and
they would have to begin life as free men miserably poor, with neither
land, money nor provisions. They must, therefore, become day laborers
for their old masters and come into competition with poor white
laborers. This competition between blacks and whites would, he believed,
reduce whites' wages. Because abolitionism was an attack on property
rights, he warned Georgia's non-slave owners that they should not sit
idly by and allow other people's slave property to be taken from them.

According to some historians,
Brown's forecast of a non-slave future was pretty accurate. Economic
historian Gavin Wright, for example, observes that, while before the War
the South was not a low wage region, afterwards, for the unskilled, it
was, and unskilled whites' wages were depressed almost to the level of
those paid blacks. Slave owners who, he says, before the War sought to
maximize the value of the output of their slave workers, and, therefore,
their value, after the War became landlords desiring to maximize the
value of the output of their land.

Fortunately for Brown, it was not
known until long after his death that in order to obtain his release
after the War, he agreed to induce Georgians to be loyal to the U.S.
However, it appears that there was no dishonesty involved in his making
this promise, as it seems that, ever the realist, he believed what he
preached. He explained joining the Republican Party after the War by
observing that "We may offer resistance, or refuse to act, for years to
come, and live under military government, or in a state of anarchy, and
we will still be compelled, in the end to come to the terms dictated by
the conqueror. Then why delay longer? "To continue to pay taxes and be
dominated by a government in which you had no representation was," he
believed, "unthinkable.

His Later Years

During the last decades of his
life Brown was one of Georgia's three most powerful politicians. The
other members of the Bourbon Triumvirate were fellow Atlantans Alfred H.
Colquitt and John B. Gordon. Though from a more prosperous family than
Joe Brown, John Brown Gordon (no relation) was also a lawyer; from the
same part of the State; and owned coal mines there that by 1860 had made
him financially secure. Unlike Brown, this fearless General was
handsome, a fine orator; and a natural-born leader of men; yet he was
much less successful as a businessman. After the War, Gordon was elected
governor and to the U.S. Senate. (Today there is a Gordon County in
Georgia, but there is no Brown County.)

How Brown solved some of his
political problems is revealed by the advice he gave his carpetbagger
partner Hannibal Kimball regarding how he might get the State of Georgia
to honor the "Bullock bonds," bonds issued during the administration of
carpetbagger governor Rufus Bullock, a one-time ally of Brown. Kimball
should, Brown said, obtain funds sufficient to control the important
newspapers, conciliate the politicians most popular with the people, and
hire lobbyists. While Brown often resorted to such use of the "carrot,"
he sometimes resorted to the stick. To silence one newspaper editor he
forced the liquidation of the newspaper by having a bank in which he was
a major stockholder foreclose on a loan to the editor.

Brown gained the seat in the U.S.
Senate earlier denied him by the voters of Georgia when General John B.
Gordon gave up his seat in order to accept a $14,000 a year position
with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (L&N) Governor Alfred
Colquitt appointed Brown to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by General
Gordon, and both Brown and Gordon agreed to support Colquitt for
reelection. Because many believed Brown had paid off Gordon in order to
get his seat, they were subject to an avalanche of criticism.

Brown made money through trading
before he became governor, while he was governor, and thereafter. He
made money during the war trading in bonds, especially railroad bonds,
and lending the State money. He was the president of and owned stock in
the company that leased the State-owned railroad, the Western and
Atlantic (W&A). This business fit like a hand in a glove with his
extensive interests in coal and iron mining in the Northwestern Georgia
served by the W&A because he used it to transport his iron and coal, and
it used his coal. He also owned stock in a sleeping car company, the
Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, the East Tennessee Railroad, the
Virginia Railroad, and the Texas and Pacific Railroad. He was also a
major stockholder in Georgia's Citizens Bank.

He began practicing law in Atlanta
in 1866, and his services were soon in greater demand than any other
lawyer in the State. None charged higher fees than he did. In 1866, he
was retained as counsel for four Augusta banks for a fee of $5,000, and
he and the president of a Macon bank agreed to be informers for the U.S.
Treasury in exchange for 25 percent of any money it recovered. In 1867,
he contracted to defend a bank for $9,000.

As of April 1, 1866, he owned
6,818 acres of land in plots scattered around the State. To this he soon
began adding Atlanta real estate. At that time most of his investments
were in farm land and Atlanta real estate. Tax returns for 1872 reveal
that he valued his Fulton County investments at $114,000 ($70,000 in
Atlanta real estate and $25,000 in stocks and bonds). He owned 1,696
acres of land in Cherokee County; 1,520 in Gordon County, and 1,708
acres in eight other counties. In addition, he owned coal- and
iron-bearing land in Bartow, Cherokee, and Dade counties. He also owned
28,000 acres of land in Texas that he had traded his stock in the Texas
and Pacific Railroad for.

When he was governor, Brown said
he would be willing to lease the State owned and operated Western and
Atlantic Railroad for $25,000 a month. By late 1870 the public outcry
against graft in the Western & Atlantic was so loud and insistent that
the idea of leasing the road received support from both major parties.
The Democrat who introduced in the General Assembly a bill to lease the
W&A asked Brown, who was then Chief Justice of Georgia's Supreme Court,
to put the finishing touches to the bill.

A group headed by Brown and
Kimball submitted a bid, and although their bid of $25,000, the minimum
allowed, was not the low bid, they got the lease. Their group merged
with one of the two other bidding groups, one of whose members got a
large payment from Brown for unspecified services. ("I have made it a
rule as a lawyer," Brown wrote, "to law for other people who desired it
and compromise for myself."

Like Gordon, at his mines Brown
worked convict labor leased from the State. Public protest against the
lease system resulted in four investigations of convict camps.
Investigating committees consistently gave Brown the best report.
Presumably, Brown did not hurt his cause by giving investigators free
transportation on the W&A and hosting a dinner for them

In 1887, in a debate about a
proposed amendment to the Constitution he opposed that would prevent a
state from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex, he denied that
suffrage would raise women's pay because wages are determined by supply
and demand, and being able to vote would not supply women with more
strength and ability.

In a speech he made on the floor
of the Senate on March 27, 1882 on a tariff bill, Brown revealed that he
was opposed to direct (internal) taxes because, unlike a tariff, they
were not progressive. Tariffs on imports are progressive in nature, he
said, because the wealthy consume a disproportionate share of imports;
while the burden of that day's direct taxes levied a more equal burden
on the public. He advocated the elimination of direct taxes because they
were not progressive. Only in time of war did he think it was right to
levy them. Although he said in this speech that the federal government
should spend less, in the Senate he fought hard to direct federal funds
to Georgia; disproportionately in the case of education because Georgia,
like the other Southern States, lagged behind the rest of the nation.
Even though the intent in levying a tariff is to raise revenue, he
pointed out, it will serve to protect domestic producers of the product
the tariff is levied on; so there is no such thing as a purely revenue
tariff.

"I am," he declared, "neither a
free-trade man, willing to collect all the money we have to raise by
direct tax upon the people, nor am I willing to lay a tax simply for
protection when the Government does not need the money. But if I had it
in my power I would raise all the money necessary to support the
Government by tariff, and I would so adjust the tariff which we have to
raise to meet the necessary expenses of the Government as to afford as
far as possible an incidental protection to home industry...." He was
also a supporter of a return to a bimetallic (gold and silver) monetary
standard.

Brown retired from the Senate
before his death in 1894. By then most Georgians had forgiven him for
turning Republican after the War. According to the author of a history
of Cherokee County, "It was Brown's gift for expediency that caused him
to fall into popular disfavor when the war and his last term as governor
were over. Foreseeing the era of the carpetbaggers, he aligned himself
with the Republican party and advocated submission to the victorious
North. That he was able by this policy to make reconstruction easier for
Georgia is now undisputed, but his about-face won him much contemporary
bitterness."

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